SOCIAL MEDIA, THE TRANSPARENT ORGANISATION, AND Dissent via Algebra

In my last post, I spoke about The Once-a-Decade Newspaper.  There are a number of tools in the futurists' toolkit, but looking for signals of change (Environment Scanning) is perhaps the most critical and widely used.  Looking for these signals helps us to discover the "unknown unknowns" that can disrupt our comfortable status quo - usually our entrenched markets and models. By finding the patterns in these signals, we identify trends - and we can use these to think about our position in a changing world.  

One of these trends is the speed at which information (..., and misinformation, and dissent) spread through social media.  Social media has been credited as playing a major role in the Arab Spring.  If you look to changethis.org, you'll see that fringe issues can get significant attention and support, spreading 'virally' through social media.  Those with the most twitter followers get a faster response when complaining about service on twitter, though this can be a risky strategy if you don't want to lose followers.  The implications of this for many organisations are that there are increasing expectations to be more transparent, and to have the autonomy and initiative to respond quickly and humanely when things go "off script".  Nobody wants to be trending on Twitter for the wrong reasons - remember the United debacle last year? A passenger was dragged, bleeding, off an aircraft because United had over-booked the flight.  The incident was captured on video by another passenger.  The next day, United lost a billion dollars in shareholder value.

#FavFriday RT @NeelKasurde: United Airlines new tag-line. #newunitedairlinesmottos #ua #UnitedAirlines pic.twitter.com/90DawhnuHQ

— J. (@_JoshuaJay) April 28, 2017

This week, online dissent in China led to the letter N, Winnie the Pooh, and a number of other references being temporarily censored in China.  The story goes like this:

Mao Zedong ruled the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, effectively making him a dictator for life.  The current two-term limit for Presidents and Vice-Presidents in China was introduced after his death by successor Deng Xiaoping to ensure that there could never be another dictatorship like it. This week, the Communist Party of China voted to remove the two-term limit.  In effect, this would set current leader Xi Jinping up to be stay in office beyond 2023.

Public Dissent isn't common in China, but the move made the Chinese internet go crazy.  Jinping is often compared to Winnie the Pooh, and this is the reason that both Winnie (and Disney) were censored from Weibo, China's version of Twitter.  (Also banned: the characters for Disagree, Emigrate, and references to Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World). 

The letter N was also banned - to understand the significance of this, consider that N is the algebraic representation for an unknown number of time periods. N > 2 was being uses as an algebraic representation that the number of Jinping's Presidential terms (N) would be greater than 2, so the letter N was banned.  When it happens, Chinese dissent sure does get nerdy.  

Read More: 

Xi Jinping could now rule China for life—just what Deng Xiaoping tried to prevent - Quartz

Sensitive Words banned on Weibo - China Digital Times

 

The Once-a-Decade Newspaper

Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure of being the International Keynote Speaker for the Workplaces and Workforces of the Future conference in Auckland, New Zealand.  As it turns out, it's going to be a very Kiwi year - I'll be back in just a few weeks to run our Strategic Workforce Planning Masterclass in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch; and then on April 9th I'll be the keynote speaker at the HR Leaders Summit in Auckland.

One of the concepts we discussed was the once-a-decade newspaper. Imagine there was a newspaper that was only published once a decade, and an edition came out today.  (Perhaps this edition would be digital only, given the changing economics of the newspaper industry.)

In the Economics section, there would be a story about Bitcoin, a digital currency not backed by any government, that now has a market capitalisation of  $177 Trillion USD, almost the GDP of New Zealand.  When the last edition of this newspaper was published, the Bitcoin Whitepaper, the document laying out the case for the currency in the wake of the GFC, hadn't even been published yet.

It might include a story about how there's been a convertible orbiting space, or that there are now three rivers that have legal rights.  It would surely mention that there are now 26 countries that have legalised same sex marriage, up from three in 2008.

In politics, there would surely be a story about the Obama Presidency, Trump’s election, and the Arab Spring.  Perhaps it would include a story about China's development of a social reputation index.

From a workforce perspective, there would be a story about how 94% of all new jobs being created in the USA are temporary, and that there’s a completely automated supermarket in Seattle.  Another would be about how McDonald's, the largest employer of youth in Australia and New Zealand, is automating the ordering process with touch-screens.  Big Data and Artificial Intelligence would feature, and there'd be a story about mobile phone games development which didn’t exist in the last edition, has become a $41 Billion industry (and that’s just for games!).

Put in these terms, it's easy to see how world has changed profoundly in a ten-year period, and the world of work is changing with it... yet many of our people practices stay the same.  While knowledge work and it’s location have been dis-intermediated, we still hire people in the same old paradigm and in the same locations that we always have - we just give them the option to “work from home”.  Sometimes.  But by responding to the trend rather than it's drivers, we leave plenty of opportunity un-explored!

When developing workforce strategy, it's critical that we understand the changes not just our workforce, but our organisation and our industry too.  It's critical that we look ahead to the possible changes on the horizon if we are to build a truly agile workforce - that's why when Kienco works with organisations to develop a Strategic Workforce Plan, applied foresight is a critical part of the methodology, along with understanding of the current workforce and the labour market.

For most organisations, more than half of the people in your workforce were hired before all of the significant changes listed above.  Add in the changes to your industry, and the world is a very different place - not only in terms of the work that we're doing, but the workforce's expectations and skillsets.  The core question of Strategic Workforce Planing is this: How can we identify, build, and support the ideal workforce of the future - the one best positioned to execute the vision, mission, and strategy of our organisations - when we can't predict one "official" future?  In order to answer this question, we need to blend art and science, data and foresight.  With data alone, we are trying to steer into the future while looking in the rear view mirror!  After all, there are no facts about the future, and all of our data is about the past.  

If you'd like to know more about how you can blend analytics with foresight for a truly robust Strategic Workforce Plan, let's have a chat!